Hi @helios
I presume you were doing a ‘duale/ betriebliche Ausbildung’, i.e. you were doing a mix of learning at school and working at a company. As you were paying taxes and into the social security system, a duale/ betriebliche Ausbildung is considered a ‘Beschäftigung’. Having done this for the past twelve months, you fulfil one of the conditions of a Beschäftigungsduldung.
Another requirement is that the work was for 20 hours a week. I imagine that you were often switching between some weeks where you worked more hours than that and some weeks where you worked a lot less or not at all (i.e. the weeks where you went to the Berufsschule). I was not able to find any information on how the authorities would assess such a situation. Generally, when a new law is introduced, the authorities provide detailed guidelines on how it is to be implemented. For the changes to the Beschäftigungsduldung, I have looked at the guidelines and found no update to them regarding the 20 hours. Previously under the law, a person required 35 hours and so such a situation was unlikely to arise.
It would make sense for the authorities to **** at your working hours over the past twelve months and see whether on average you were working 20 hours a week. In theory, they could point to specific weeks and say here and there you were not working 20 hours and so cannot get a Beschäftigungsduldung. But that would be an overly strict interpretation of the law in my view.
Best,
Éanna